Pursuing an Intellectual Interest Satisfied My Natural

¶ … pursuing an intellectual interest satisfied my natural passion solving problems; however, it left me strangely unfulfilled for reasons that were not immediately apparent to me. With a team of friends, I developed a cheap MP3 system that enables users to upload and listen to audio books. On an intellectual level, it was a meaningful achievement. However, I eventually realized that although the project provided assistance to some users who otherwise had limited access to information in those convenient formats, there was evidence all around me that suggested the need for much more significant projects.

Specifically, in my home community, I am surrounded by fellow Palestinians who endure day after day without access to enough electricity to support ordinary life needs. The more I thought about the reality of their lives, the more I realized that for my pursuit of solutions to provide genuine fulfillment, it would have to satisfy more than just my natural interest in solving problems. It would to do something more meaningful than just meeting a challenge. Since I already had an intellectual curiosity about renewable energy technology, Renewable Energy World magazine, the obvious answer was to pursue my natural drive to solve problems in a way that channeled the results into the most meaningful and productive results possible.